Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

… but by and large most people will get better, so open everything up and if they get sick, then they get sick.

After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier.

Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot.

Lisa Mizelle, a veteran nurse practitioner at an urgent care clinic who fell ill with the virus in July, finds herself forgetting routine treatments and lab tests, and has to ask colleagues about terminology she used to know automatically.

“I leave the room and I can’t remember what the patient just said,” she said, adding that if she hadn’t exhausted her medical leave she’d take more time off.

“It scares me to think I’m working,” Ms. Mizelle, 53, said. “I feel like I have dementia.”

It’s becoming known as Covid brain fog: troubling cognitive symptoms that can include memory loss, confusion, difficulty focusing, dizziness and grasping for everyday words. Increasingly, Covid survivors say brain fog is impairing their ability to work and function normally.

“There are thousands of people who have that,” said Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious disease at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, who has already seen hundreds of survivors at a post-Covid clinic he leads. “The impact on the work force that’s affected is going to be significant.

Scientists aren’t sure what causes brain fog, which varies widely and affects even people who became only mildly physically ill from Covid-19 and had no previous medical conditions. Leading theories are that it arises when the body’s immune response to the virus doesn’t shut down or from inflammation in blood vessels leading to the brain.​

SIDE NOTE: I’m going to disagree with the reporting here. We’ve known for a while that SARS-CoV-2 attacks nerve and brain tissue, which explains the loss of taste and smell reported by many patients in the early stages. It shouldn’t take much imagination to realize that a virus which attacks those nerves would probably attack the brain itself.

COVID-19: Severe brain damage possible even with mild symptoms | DW | 09.07.2020
What Does Covid-19 Do to Your Brain?​

Confusion, delirium and other types of altered mental function, called encephalopathy, have occurred during hospitalization for Covid-19 respiratory problems, and a study found such patients needed longer hospitalizations, had higher mortality rates and often couldn’t manage daily activities right after hospitalization.

But research on long-lasting brain fog is just beginning. A French report in August on 120 patients who had been hospitalized found that 34 percent had memory loss and 27 percent had concentration problems months later.

In a soon-to-be-published survey of 3,930 members of Survivor Corps, a group of people who have connected to discuss life after Covid, over half reported difficulty concentrating or focusing, said Natalie Lambert, an associate research professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, who helped lead the study. It was the fourth most common symptom out of the 101 long-term and short-term physical, neurological and psychological conditions that survivors reported. Memory problems, dizziness or confusion were reported by a third or more respondents.​

‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors

There’s going to be a generation of children who survived COVID-19 but whose brains will never work right again. I realize that’s not important to the “we need schools open, and kids will be fine” crowd, but they can go fuck themselves.

 

That is nothing less than brilliant.

 

It’ll happen. But I think it’s a year or more away. Because half of this country is insane. We could be New Zealand. But for millions of morons here.

I spent a wonderful day with my wife. Cooking, having some afternoon drinks and listening to Van Halen after our conversation turned to the death of EVH. It ended up as a conversation as who we needed to see live as soon as this is all over.

The broadway shutdown till at least May is a dagger. Expected, but especially painful. The businesses that depend on it are going to be slaughtered.

 

This is going to sound heartless, but I’m not really all that moved by all the anecdotes about various long-term covid symptoms.

There are places on the internet where you can get dozens of personal accounts of the various long-term complications of living with Morgellon’s. The only problem is that morgellon’s is as real as Qanon or lizard people.

I will also be skipping self-reported symptom surveys (how do you even separate long-term covid symptoms with the side effects of the prolonged stress of living in a society-shattering pandemic?) and any headlines breathlessly touting the word “can.”

I’ll let the scientists do their work and report back when we can place estimates population-wide incidence per capita or per case.

 

And I’m triply suspicious of a survey done entirely
of people who have their social identities sufficiently tied to post-covid to have joined a support group

 

We can't be New Zealand.

No country --- none --- with a land mass more than 5% as large as the United States is a COVID "success" story.

We're comparing Pluto and Jupiter.

 

I mean, Australia is in the low-hundreds right now. Canada is in the 1,000 to 2,000 range per day, over the past month. A quick Google search says we had 44,000 new cases on Oct. 11. I'm not sure which countries have done worse than us. Maybe Russia, China and Brazil, because I don't trust the regimes in place there to accurately report cases.

 

I'm going to play contrarian here, but can't they have the wedding at the justice of the peace?

Is the wedding the goal, or is the wedding just the start of a lifetime of building a life together, etc?

Not ripping on your son, but I hear way too much about weddings, and not the marriage itself.

 

They've lived together for several years. They ARE married in reality. A JP marriage would be as artificial as the larger celebration they wish in terms of the status of their relationship. It's their life together and their choice.